Reviews

“HEAT AND LIGHT is a riveting panoramic tale, keying in on the lives impacted by Big Energy’s ceaseless feeding frenzy. In the spirit of Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the novels of Dana Spiotta and Rachel Kushner, Jennifer Haigh’s writing gives full measure to the intimate lives within: Houston power brokers, desperate landowners willing to lease the earth under their feet, and mercenary contractors with gargantuan machinery ready to get at the prehistoric shale deposits below. HEAT AND LIGHT is a greyhound of a novel—smart, sharp, hyperprecise, and near incantatory in its momentum.”

— RICHARD PRICE

“HEAT AND LIGHT is a stunning book, a grand book, a book of old-fashioned power and scale. Within its pitiless and wide-open sights it takes aim at power and greed, plunder and the profit motive, the rapacity inherent in the American Dream and the complicity of its victims. It works on a wide canvas and contains, before the final curtain closes, all the pleasures of the 19th-century social novel, but with a conspicuous lack of easy moralizing. Just as all politics is local, so Haigh knows that all good fiction is personal, with the texture of the specific, and she writes prose with the spine in mind. This is an unsparing book, and one that sings.”

— JOSHUA FERRIS,author of Then We Came to the End

“Paragraph by paragraph, the prose is full of marvelous texture and material sensation. HEAT AND LIGHT is an intricate and ambitious novel, firmly grounded in history and our time. The narrator’s encyclopedic knowledge and keen insights about the physical world and social life make the novel a thrilling page turner.”

— HA JIN,National Book Award–winningauthor of Waiting

“HEAT AND LIGHT is a work of tremendous sweep and ambition, a timely, inventive novel powered by Jennifer Haigh’s remarkable compassion for her characters.”

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Heat and Light

PAPERBACK ON SALE FEBRUARY 28, 2017

Jennifer Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town at the center of her iconic novel Baker Towers, in this ambitious, achingly human story of modern America and the conflicting forces at its heart.

Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas.

To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling—until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives.

Heat and Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources. Soaring, ambitious, it zooms from drill rig to shareholders’ meeting to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to the ruined landscape of the “strippins,” haunting reminders of Pennsylvania’s past energy booms. This is a dispatch from a forgotten America—a work of searing moral clarity from one of the finest writers of her generation, a courageous and necessary book.